The latest from the New Brunswick theater cloys more than it charms
In choosing to mount the 2008 musical "Daddy Long Legs," with music and lyrics by Paul Gordon and book by John Caird, New Brunswick's George Street Playhouse seems to have been aiming for light holiday fare, but landed instead squarely on romantic nonsense.
To a certain extent, the selection is a safe bet: "Daddy Long Legs" was a surprise hit last year at New York's Davenport Theatre, where it ran for over three hundred performances and earned a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Book. It has found success regionally and internationally, as well. But this fairy tale cloys more than it charms, and George Street's production does little to make this story or its characters relatable.
An epistolary musical based on a 1912 novel by Jean Webster, the show unfolds laboriously over two and a half hours before arriving at the conclusion that was unmistakable from the early moments of the first act. Along the way, narrative songs backed by a monotonously jaunty score carry a plot that unfolds almost exclusively offstage, allowing us to experience only characters' responses to and assessments of events to which we are rarely privy.
A two-hander starring Elise Vannerson as orphan Jerusha Abbott and Ben Michael as her wealthy anonymous benefactor, Jervis Pendleton, "Daddy Long Legs" examines a relationship that buds and blossoms through a strange system of anonymous correspondence.
Jervis sits on the board of an orphanage where Jerusha is the eldest resident, and his philanthropic streak provokes him to fund her college education. There are, of course, conditions, the most notable of which is that although Jerusha will never be allowed to know his true identity, she must write him regular letters updating her progress.
Jerusha, presuming her financier to be a crusty old businessman, nicknames him Daddy Long Legs. Her precocious wonderment at a new world emerging in front of her charms Jervis, who is in reality young and handsome. We know from very early on that it is only a matter a time before romance wins the day.
And yet as the show carries on, "Daddy Long Legs" becomes more of an arduous waiting game than a play with any real drama. The music doesn't help. The vast majority of the show's narrative comes through sung versions of the letters Jerusha writes -- sometimes she sings while composing, sometimes Jervis does while reading, and sometimes they toss lines back and forth -- but since the score lacks variety (the three-person orchestra features only cello, piano, and guitar, with the latter two dominating), each new song seems like just another verse to some interminable tune.
Neither performer does much to find any great depth in his or her character, and they seem to have found little help in the stolid direction of Michael Mastro. Despite Alexis Distler's large and varied set, Mastro struggles to move his characters much beyond their respective writing desks -- a shortcoming that mirrors the production's difficulty in moving deeper than the character's surface emotions.
Daddy Long Legs
George Street Playhouse, 9 Livingston Avenue, New Brunswick, through December 24th.
Tickets available online www.GSPonline.org or by phone (732) 246-7717
Patrick Maley may be reached at patrickjmaley@gmail.com. Find him on Twitter @PatrickJMaley. Find NJ.com/Entertainment on Facebook.